“I’ve just been reading a magazine article on the subject of psychic research by Booth Tarkington,” he added presently. “It’s well written and exceedingly interesting. Most men of science have been convinced of the reality of the spiritual body.”
He is an artist of no slight attainment and in his home at St. Anthony specimens of his handicraft abound, but not obtrusively. Dr. Grenfell never puts anything that he is or has done on view to be admired.
He is a keen ornithologist, and even when he is at top speed to get back to his boat and weigh anchor he will pause to note the friendly grackles hopping about a wharf or the unfettered grace of the gyrations of the creaking gulls. He is a collector of butterflies. “I was out driving with a man who didn’t see the butterflies and had no interest in them. Just think what such a man misses in his life!”
He also collects birds’ eggs, flowering plants (many of which have been named at Cambridge), seaweed and shells. The great book he wrote and edited on Labrador gives a clear idea of his interest in the geology as well as the fauna and flora of the region.
I found him the last thing at night at St. Anthony trying to discover why one of a pair of box kites he had made wouldn’t remain aloft as it should.
He is perpetually acquisitive and inquisitive: the diversity of his interests rivals the appetite of Roosevelt for every sort of information. Sir Frederick Treves mourned that a great surgeon was lost to London when Grenfell embarked on the North Sea to the healing and helping of fishermen. But Grenfell has become much more than a great surgeon. With all that he is and does, he gives to every part of his almost boundless field of interests a careful, methodical, analytic intellect. Haste and the constant pressure of his over-driven life have not made him superficial. He sets a sail with the same care he gives to the setting of a compound fracture: he is of the number of those who believe that there is but one right way to do everything. Of such is the kingdom of science and of inestimable service.
VIII
THE MAN OF LAW
In his capacity as magistrate, the Doctor never sidesteps trouble. Law in his part of the world is a matter not merely of the letter but of the spirit—not of the statute alone but of shrewd common sense. His decisions are luminous with a Lincolnian light of acumen and sympathy at once. He lets the jot and tittle—the mint, anise-seed and cummin—take care of themselves, and considers the real significance of the situation and the essential nature of the offence. Red tape is not the important thing, and the imaginary dignity of an invisible judicial ermine is not besmirched because Magistrate Grenfell discusses the case with a culprit as a father might talk things over with a son, and makes it plain why wrong was done—if it was done—and why there must henceforth be a different course on the part of the offender. He “lays down the law” not as if it were a Mosaic dispensation from a beclouded mountain top, but as if it were the simple and discreet way to walk for God-fearing and reasonable mankind. To him, forever, a man’s own soul is a matter more important than an ordinance, and he spares no pains to make his meaning so plain that the dullest apprehension cannot fail to grasp it. You will see Grenfell at his best when—in a whipping wind, bareheaded, sweatered, rubber-booted—he stands in the clear glitter of a bracing sunny day on the beach with the dogs aprowl around him, painstakingly explaining to a fisherman why it is right to do thus and reprehensible to do otherwise. And now and then a hearty laugh or a timely anecdote—Lincoln’s trait again—clears the atmosphere. Sometimes there are more formidable leets and law courts held among the whalemeat barrels and the firewood on the Strathcona: but more often it is a plain matter of a tête-à-tête while Grenfell is on his rambling rounds of a hamlet with his dilapidated leather bag of instruments and medicines.
Forteau offered its own problems to Dr. Grenfell, the Magistrate. There is an isle not far away where that sometimes toothsome bird the puffin makes his home. Fishermen from Forteau, hard put to it to secure anti-scorbutic fresh meat, might now and then shoot one of the birds, and the duty of the faithful lighthouse-keeper, Captain Coté, an appointed game-warden, was to see that the law’s majesty made itself respected. One day Coté caught a hunter red-handed. “By what warrant do you arrest me?” said the man behind the gun. “By this!” said Coté, flourishing a revolver. Is a magistrate to blame if he believes that common sense should differentiate between a poor fisherman desperate with hunger, and a pot-hunter who commits wholesale murder among the eider-ducks sitting on their nests? Usually it is the poor fisherman who is fined and made to give up his gun, because he pleads “guilty,” while the pot-hunter who unblushingly pleads “not guilty” goes scot-free. A fisherman at Flower’s Cove told me that a late lamented coast magistrate—who got half of the fines he imposed—was making “big money” from his calling. He fined one man $100 for importing a second-hand stove without paying customs duties. When the Strathcona hove in sight, bearing Dr. Grenfell, this profiteering magistrate weighed anchor in haste, and in a heavy beam sea and shallow water made his “get-away.”
There are always disputes between traders and fishermen to be adjudicated. Two men within an hour of each other clambered over the rail of the Strathcona to display dire written threats of wrath to come from the same West Coast merchant, in a court summons served by a constable. This document, accompanying a bill of particulars, says that if they don’t pay at once the balance due they’ll have to go to St. John’s at a cost of fifty dollars in addition to whatever the amount may be which the law assesses against them. It isn’t just the amount of the ticket to St. John’s, or the board while they are there: it’s the loss of time from the traps that is exacerbating.